Job search as a beauty contest

September 19, 2013

With high unemployment, the Italian job market is a convenient place to put job search under scrutiny. The researchers from the University of Messina took the opportunity and test the relationship between gender, attractiveness and success in recruitment process.

After sending more than 1100 fake CVs with altered photographs to advertised job openings, they found out that physical attractiveness indeed affects the recruitment process. Moreover, good looks played a much bigger part in job prospects for women than men. The average call back rate for all of the CVs was 30%. Regardless of gender, those being marked as more attractive were called back half of the time. However, only 7% of women in the unattractive group made it to the interview, while the rate for men was 26%. The paper ironically concluded: “searching for a job seems to be just like a beauty contest: it is better for unattractive women to invest on aesthetic surgery than in education”.